“Responsibility for Work and Its Effects" (with Dana Nelkin). Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Work, Forthcoming.
In this chapter, we consider the question of how to attribute—and distribute—responsibility for work and its effects, focusing especially on cases when work has bad effects and there is not obviously a single person to blame. We assess answers provided by collective or group agency views and individualist views, in part by showing how a subtle understanding of the relationship among responsibility, blameworthiness, and liability can help resolve apparently recalcitrant collective cases. Drawing insights from each view, we introduce and assess an individualist account according to which each agent is responsible and blameworthy in virtue of what they do given their opportunities, where the focus is on the ex-ante assessment of the possible consequences of agents’ contributions in light of situational factors including the actions and omissions of others. We then highlight the distinctiveness of work by exploring the difference between moral and other kinds of responsibility for work and the hierarchical structure characteristic of work in collective contexts.
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“An Unwelcome Implication for Omnivores?” Utilitas (2025)
Most people believe that animal agriculture for food production is permissible. At the same time, bestiality enjoys neither widespread social endorsement nor practice. It would be surprising, then, if it turned out that a commitment to the permissibility of one implied the permissibility of the other. This is the case that I make in this paper. Given the truth of some very plausible moral premises, I show that in a wide range of possible instantiations, if a social practice of raising animals for food is permissible, then so too is a social practice of raising animals for sex. While I don’t explicitly argue for this, my hope is that this compels readers to reject the permissibility of animal agriculture rather than endorse the permissibility of bestiality.
This paper argues that if relational egalitarianism grounds a requirement of democracy at the state level, then it also does so at the level of the firm.
This paper argues that there is an important connection between relational equality, basic moral equality, and democracy. Specifically, it argues that our basic moral equality is grounded in our autonomous agency, relational equality is grounded in basic moral equality, and that these two facts together entail that relational equality requires democracy.
This paper investigates whether the feeling of being subjected to another's superior power is relevant to relational egalitarian justice. I argue that it is because persistent exposure to relations which give rise to this feeling make it difficult for us to regard one another as the equals that we are, and such regard is a constituent of relational equality.
This paper investigates the ways in which we can change the meaning of another's action by changing the reasons she has to act. We argue that doing so can sometimes be wrongful -- representing an unjustified invasion into another's deliberative process. We conclude with some thoughts on what this means for everyday morality.
This paper argues against the widespread view that relations of domination are, in and of themselves, seriously objectionable. The central case is made via a novel thought experiment which fully isolates the domination variable and asks us to trade something of value to avoid domination per se. It argues that analysis of such a case shows that, despite intuitive appearance, domination is not itself morally important.
The beneficiary pays principle (BPP) standardly states that when one benefits as a result of wrongdoing, one can come to owe compensation to the victim of the wrongdoing in question. In this paper, I highlight various explanatory problems with this way of understanding the BPP. Most importantly, this account of the BPP fails to explain what I call the "primacy" and "weight" intuitions. The primacy intuition states that when the wrongdoer themselves is able to be made to pay compensatory damages, they are solely on the hook for doing so. The weight intuition states that the moral importance of competing reasons needed to outweigh one's obligation to compensate the victim of a wrongdoing is much lower when considering the beneficiary than when considering the wrongdoer.
After explaining why the standard view of the BPP struggles to make sense of these two intuitions, I take up the task of presenting a version of the BPP which allows us to accommodate them while maintain much of what was intuitively plausible about BPP to begin with. The important move, I argue, is to give up the claim that the BPP is a compensatory principle. Rather, I suggest our intuitions are better explained by holding that the connection to a wrong that both the beneficiary and victim share generates agent-relative reasons of partiality on the part of the beneficiary to promote the welfare of the victim.
Suppose there were a population of vampires that needed to feed daily on living humans to survive. This feeding results in the death of the human fed upon. It seems quite plausible that the vampires would not be permitted to feed, as this would violate the human's right to life. That the vampire needs to do this is unfortunate, but does not vitiate the human's right.
The central thrust of the paper is to present the ethical vegan with a trilemma based on the above case. The ethical vegan, so I claim, cannot endorse all three of the following simultaneously:
1) The vampires are not permitted to feed on humans because humans have a right to life.
2) Nonhuman animals have a right to life.
3) Humans are permitted to feed on nonhuman animals in survival situations.
I then survey the various options and tentatively suggest the ethical vegan relinquish a commitment to (3). I conclude with some considerations aimed at lessening the seeming severity of this conclusion.
Some relational egalitarians believe that the value of equality explains the authority of democratically made decisions. Put simply, when one chooses to disobey a law made through a procedure which treats all as equals, one treats one's fellow citizens as inferiors. This paper argues that this is implausible in cases of disobedience to substantively unjust law. I present my case in the form of a dilemma. When one's co-citizens voted, they either did so with the aim of furthering justice or with the aim of simply imposing their will, come what may for justice. If the former, then when one disobeys an unjust law, one does not treat their fellow citizens as inferiors, because one acts in a way which respects their deeper, truer commitments. If the latter, then the citizens' vote was simply a display of naked power and cannot plausibly generate relational reasons for obedience. So, in either case, democratically made decisions do not have a special authority grounded in relational egalitarian value. At least not in cases of substantively unjust law.
In Considerations on Representative Government, Mill famously argues for a plural voting scheme based on competence, wherein the more epistemically virtuous have a greater share of voting power than the average citizen. Egalitarian democrats have largely dismissed such suggestions as elitist and antithetical to the democratic ethos. In this paper I argue that a plural voting scheme can be justified on explicitly egalitarian grounds. I do so by utilizing Fluerbey’s “scalar all-affected principle” which states that one ought have a democratic say in some decision to the extent that one’s interests will be affected by this decision. I argue that this principle can be grounded on the egalitarian premise that we all should have equal political power over one another, and that the scalar all-affected principle implies the permissibility of plural voting schemes. While epistemic superiority may not be its basis, plural voting is not inegalitarian, as such.
In this paper I argue that many of the purported rights capitalists have over productive property belie the legitimate purpose of property rights generally. Property, I argue, is best understood as a social convention designed to protect and further our interests in autonomy. Property rights, then, are derived from, and gain their value in virtue of, our autonomy rights. But the purported rights of capitalists over productive property frequently entail a right to the control of people, and thus run roughshod over the value of autonomy. Capitalist property rights represent a specific use of a social convention which undermines the very purpose that convention was meant to serve. I call this a “Millian Subversion,” in reference to Mill’s famous discussion regarding the impermissibility of selling oneself into slavery.